community garden under snow cover

These are clips of my community garden, the Belmont Victory Gardens, that I took from a vimeo by David Sprogis: Rock Meadow. Rock Meadow is a 70 acre piece of conservation land in Belmont that includes the Victory Gardens. It's a really beautiful vimeo of the area taken from the air.



My garden plot is right in the center of the lower photo.

summer at the community garden

The gardens are so beautiful and full of produce. Skippy and I walked around the paths and I took photos. Here's a slideshow.

gray gardens

Our community gardens are looking like winter. Only a few greens left growing here and there. The haphazard fences and gates are bits of color on the drab background. A photo of my empty plot is below.

november garden plots

Today Skippy and I walked through the Belmont Community Gardens. There are many that look great with lots of things still growing. The mild fall weather has been good for gardens. These are a few photos I took:

belmont community gardens

This is an area we have newly cleared at the south east side of the Belmont community gardens. It was all brambles and small buckthorn trees. Its off to the side and out of the main view of the front path into the gardens. We'd like to put our compost, manure and wood chip piles here in the future. We're also setting up a big bin for composting garden waste here - for gardeners who don't do this in their own plot.

Belmont Community Victory Gardens

We have been putting a lot of work into the front area of our community gardens. We would like a nice inviting grass area with the garden plots behind. And nice grassy paths between all the plots.

Its wonderful how native grasses seed themselves naturally if an overgrown area is mowed. We have just finished leveling sufficiently to run a lawn mower. Here's the view just after the very first mowing. Isn't it beautiful!!

We will be holding a work day tomorrow to continue working on the grass. I haven't done a very good job of circulating information on this event, but it will be held from 10 am -12 noon tomorrow (Saturday). Please come and help us. Bring weed whackers lawn mowers, clippers, or rakes.

We will flatten the front area at the far right of the photo - in front of the new plots. There are rock and debris piles to remove and dirt pile to flatten. We will also mow/weed whack/clip the grass in the paths. I have done about 1/3 of the paths so far, and it would be good to get then all done this weekend.

I enjoyed seeing a whole flock of baby bluebirds foraging in the freshly mowed area the other day. A clutch of 4 or 5 was recently hatched from a box in the meadow. Bluebirds like areas with short grass and perching posts. Our mowed entrance not only looks neat and is a good place for garden events, but it's also a valuable wildlife habitat.

Other reasons to come and help out with the path work: I will bring FREE COFFEE and its fun to work together with other gardeners.

Another event to mention is the Solstice Garden Tours that will be held on Sunday June 20 at the Belmont Victory Gardens. An informal event. Our first time trying this. This will run 11 am - 1 pm. Come enjoy the results of the path and front area work we do the day before!

new plots

These are a couple of the new plots we cleared last weekend during our community garden work day. These plots were used years ago, but then abandoned when interest dropped about 10 or so years ago. We removed a large buck thorn tree that had overgrown the area and lots of raspberry canes. Then the soil was rototilled. One of the plots had become a compost area and the soil there looks incredibly good. I believe we will be assigning these plots in the next week or two - our waiting list, which is still more than 50.

Work Day

We had a fantastic Work Day at the Belmont Victory Garden on Saturday! It was really amazing to see how much work we got done!! And everyone seemed to be having such fun. Nothing like happy gardeners. I supervised the work details and assigned photography duties to a super photographer. He took 200 photos and in all of them, everyone is smiling! (Except maybe the rock moving crew.) I love to look back at all the smiling faces.

We also assigned 6 or 8 plots to new gardeners. Looks like we'll have an additional 20 or so ready to assign in a week or two.

By the way, that's me in the red jacket and yellow tee shirt.

community garden work day

Tomorrow is the Belmont Victory Garden Work Day. We will assign about 10 plots available from gardeners who are leaving - to the top of a waiting list of about 80.

And we have a list of projects to accomplish. The weather looks good. With luck, we'll accomplish lots.

community garden planning

Our Community Garden Planning is starting up. It looks like our Work and Plot Assignment Day will be April 10th. Mark your calender if you have a plot at the BVG!

We have an enormous waiting list this year - 80 so far. Too bad there isn't space for everyone who wants to grow their own food. The good news is we likely will have at least several additional new pots this year in an area the town has newly cleared.

goggle satellite map of Belmont Victory Gardens

This is an aerial snap shot of our community gardens that I came across today. Looks like late in the day on about April 18, 2007. The resolution is amazing! I can see that I had cleared and turned my plot, but there's no fence up yet. Seems to me Google had a lower resolution version last time I looked.

winners of the giant vegetable contest!

Julia and Rebecca easily won the Giant Vegetable Contest at the Belmont Victory Garden Seed Swap and Garden Harvest Celebration yesterday. They entered a 20.6 lb pumpkin grown by Belmont High School Girls Cross Country Team. They ran up at the last minute to see if they were in time for the contest. They were. Congratulations to the whole team!

The big pumpkin has been growing all season in the Coach's plot. The team often runs the 2-3 miles from the High School to the gardens and tends the plot. Then they run the 2-3 miles back to school. With this routine, its hard for them to harvest anything. But they sure grew a nice pumpkin.

My pumpkin weighed just under 15 lbs and came in second. I'm looking forward to next year's contest!

more photos of the belmont victory garden seed swap

- Thanks to Botanical Interests for providing fantastic seeds for the gardeners. These were definitely a hit.
- Things gardeners brought and swapped included bean and carrot seeds, and raspberry divisions.
- The swappers toured the garden paths in the drizzle - an area of over 1 acre with about 120 active plots.
- We ate 2 loaves of my pumpkin bread.

The topic of discussion was - gardening. This included:
- Gretta had lots of Late Blight advice. I'll put this in a separate post.
- Improving local food availability: Gretta would like to see a local grain and dried bean CSA and is looking for land. In our area, we now have a number of vegetable and meat farms, but no grains are local. This would require not only land and farmers, but a mill.
- How to improve communication at the community garden. We haven't been very successful with our Yahoo b-board. We're thinking of trying a blog/Facebook format. Plus a Scout will soon construct a non-virtual bulletin board for us.